On April 25, 2001, Procter
and Gamble (P&G) put its product Crisco on the auction block, just ten years
short of its 100th birthday. Crisco, initially made with hydrogenated cottonseed
oil, is the quintessential imitation food, and the first to make its way into
American kitchens.

The story of Crisco begins innocently
enough in pre-Civil War America when candle maker William Proctor and his
brother-in-law, soap-maker James Gamble, joined forces to compete with fourteen
other soap and candle makers in Cincinnati, Ohio. P&G entered the shortening
business out of necessity. In the 1890s, the meat packing monopoly controlled
the price of lard and tallow needed to make candles and soap.1
P&G took steps to gain control of the cottonseed oil business from farm to
factory. By 1905, they owned eight cottonseed mills in Mississippi. In 1907,
with the help of German chemist E. C. Kayser, P&G developed the science of
hydrogenation. By adding hydrogen atoms to the fatty acid chain, this
revolutionary industrial process transformed liquid cottonseed oil into a solid
that resembled lard.1

Not
content with using hardened cottonseed oil for soaps, and mindful that
electrification was forcing the candle business into decline, P&G looked for
other markets for their new product. Since hydrogenated cottonseed oil resembled
lard, why not sell it as a food?

The new product was initially named
Krispo, but trademark complications forced P&G to look for another name.
They next try was Cryst which was abandoned when someone in management noted a
religious connotation. Eventually they chose the near-acronym Crisco, which can
be derived from CRYStalized Cottonseed Oil.

Crisco was introduced to the public in
1911. It was an era when wives stayed home and cooked with plenty of butter and
lard. The challenge for Crisco was to convince the stay-at-home housewife about
the merits of this imitation food. P&G’s first ad campaign introduced the
all-vegetable shortening as “a healthier alternative to cooking with animal
fats. . . and more economical than butter.” With one sentence, P&G had
taken on its two closest competitors—lard and butter.

Two images from a 1912 advertisement
for Crisco in the Ladies Home Journal.

P&G’s next step was a stroke of
genius—they published and gave away a cookbook. The Story of Crisco2
looked like most other cookbooks of the era, but there was a difference. All of
its 615 recipes, everything from lobster bisque topound cake, contained—you guessed it—Crisco.

The Story of Crisco is
recognized as a classic in the subtle art of persuasion. Its language and
contextual variety are “representative of the pre-WWI social milieu and
reflect the urbanization, domestication, commercialization, education (or lack
thereof) and simple sophistication of the times.”3 Crisco is
presented as healthier, more digestible, cleaner, more economical, more
enlightened and more modern than lard. Women who use Crisco are portrayed as
good wives and mothers, their houses are free of strong cooking odors and their
children grow up with good characters (because, according to the tortured logic
of P&G’s advertising department, Crisco is easier to digest).

P&G also had the brilliant idea of
presenting Crisco to the Jewish housewife as a kosher food, one that behaved
like butter but could be used with meats. Because it made kosher cooking easier,
Jews adopted Crisco and margarine—imitation lard and imitation butter—more
quickly than other groups, with unforeseen consequences.

I remember switching from lard to
Crisco to make pie crust when I was a teenager. We always used lard from the
farm, but sometime in the 1960s, Mom innocently brought home our first can of
Crisco. We started to use it liberally. That was the overt addition to the diet.
What we didn’t know was that Crisco and its cousins were being covertly added
to countless food items.

Two images from The Story of Crisco, 1913.
On the left, a young woman holds a can of Crisco and an older woman a copy
of the cookbook. On the right, a can of Crisco is set on the ground by the
campfire.

We also didn’t know that the
partially hydrogenated oils in Crisco—the trans fatty acids—were bad
for us. In fairness to P&G, they didn’t know this either, not at first.
But when reports of problems began to appear—problems like increased heart
disease, increased cancer, growth problems, learning disorders and
infertility—P&G worked behind the scenes to cover them up.4 One scientist who
worked for P&G, Dr. Fred Mattson, can be credited with presenting the US
government’s inconclusive Lipid Research Clinics Trials to the public as proof
that animal fats caused heart disease. He was also one of the baleful influences
that persuaded the American Heart Association to preach the phony gospel of the
Lipid Hypothesis. The truth about the dangers of trans
fatty acids in foods like Crisco is finally emerging. Perhaps that is why
P&G decided to put their flagship product up for sale.

Today when somebody asks me about diet,
I make the following recommendation: vigorously seek to eliminate two
things—hydrogenated fats and high fructose corn syrup—and you will see
noticeable health improvements. Not all hydrogenated fats are made with
cottonseed oil today; in fact, most are now made with soybean oil. But by
eliminating just these two commodities—which is not as easy as it sounds—you
will find that you have eliminated the majority of the “displacing foods of
modern commerce” that Weston A. Price spoke about.

Besides all the possible health risks
of hydrogenation, I believe there is another compelling reason to avoid Crisco.
Just before harvest, cottonseed plants are sprayed with strong defoliating
chemicals to make the leaves fall off so that it is easier and cleaner to pick.
Do your own research. Type the words “cotton + defoliation” into a web browser and see what you come up with. You will be as amazed as I was.
Unfortunately, without the benefits of a lab, it would be hard to know how much
harmful residue Crisco actually contains.

However, I can provide some anecdotal
evidence. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who is an alternative health
practitioner told me that she kept running into cases in which patients had very
severe upset stomachs after eating chips. After a fair bit of investigation and
inspiration, she found a common denominator was that they had all been fried in
cottonseed oil. She herself had grown up in the South and knew about the
practice of cotton defoliation. Since then, she has counseled her patients to
avoid cottonseed oil and Crisco.

For obvious reasons, this column on
Crisco does not contain recipes.

(Update:
In June 2002, Procter & Gamble sold Crisco, along with Jif peanut butter, to
The J. M. Smuckers Company, the jam and jelly company headquartered in Orrville,
Ohio. For more information see, www.smuckers.com).

Neil, Marion Harris, The Story of Crisco: 615 Tested Recipes and a
“Calendar of Dinners, Procter & Gamble, 1913.

Pendleton, Susan C, “Man’s Most Important Food is Fat: The Use of
Persuasive Techniques in Procter & Gamble’s Public Relations Campaign to
Introduce Crisco, 1911-1913,” Public Relations Quarterly, March 22,
1999.